


and they'll be chasing their tails tryin' to track us down,

by Poe



Series: i know places [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Carer Bucky, Depressed Steve Rogers, Depression, M/M, Non-Graphic Self-Harm, POV Steve Rogers, Part 2 of the 'i know places' Series, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Ideation, reuploaded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 03:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15428136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poe/pseuds/Poe
Summary: A ghost has no need for its past, no concept of its future. It exists in flux, never changing despite the world around it. A ghost is frightening because of its very permanence, etched onto the skin of society but passing through it. A ghost is dead, death, and all that accompanies it.Bucky Barnes is very much alive, this much Steve Rogers clings on to.





	and they'll be chasing their tails tryin' to track us down,

**ghost (noun)**

[gohst]

  1. the soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons.
  2. a mere shadow or semblance; a trace:
  3. He's a ghost of his former self.
  4. a remote possibility:



_He hasn't a ghost of a chance._

  1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a spiritual being.
  2. the principle of life; soul; spirit.
  3. Informal. ghost writer.
  4. a secondary image, especially one appearing on a television screen as a white shadow, caused by poor or double reception or by a defect in the receiver.



 

                The Winter Soldier is a ghost, in so many senses of the word. He wanders through the century, controlled by various forces, receiving orders that will shape history. In the intelligence community, he is a bogey man, an uncertainty, whether he even exists or not is in question.

                A ghost has no need for its past, no concept of its future. It exists in flux, never changing despite the world around it. A ghost is frightening because of its very permanence, etched onto the skin of society but passing through it. A ghost is dead, death, and all that accompanies it.

                Bucky Barnes is very much alive, this much Steve Rogers clings on to.

 

*

 

                They find Bucky in Istanbul, holed up in a cheap motel, beaten and worn after months of crossing the continent, following the trail of razed Hydra bases and point blank executions. They approach the room with varying degrees of caution, Steve taking point.

                Bucky is thin, his skin sallow and his hair matted to his scalp. And he falls to his knees as Steve holds out a hand to him. And Steve feels the pressure of Bucky’s face against his legs, murmurs something, incoherent babblings, apologies and prayers, whilst behind him Natasha and Sam move forward. As Bucky is helped to his feet, Steve sees something fleeting of the old Bucky in those blue eyes, and expects to feel something. As Bucky is led away, a blanket around his shoulders, huddled into himself, Steve watches, watches this man, his best friend, his lover, a ghost made flesh again, and expects to feel something: relief, grief, hurt, guilt. Instead there is a numbness that is cold in its certainty. So he moves with grating limbs, gets in the truck with Bucky and the others, and slowly begins to shut down, mission complete.

 

*

 

                The Winter Soldier becomes James becomes Bucky, and Steve flounders as everybody grins at him and says, well, Cap, it must be great having your best friend back. Steve is aware that Bucky is watching him, so intensely aware, so he goes through the motions of believing it, believing that this is true, that Bucky is real and that he himself is real and whole and capable of functioning. If Bucky hears the nightmares, he does not comment. If Steve goes statue still with the sudden intensity of dissociation, colours too vivid before his eyes and too long ago to be real, then Bucky doesn’t pick him up on it. Everybody thinks he is okay. This is what Steve wants.

 

*

 

 

                S.H.I.E.L.D. threw every psychologist, psychiatrist, shrink, therapist, everyone they had at Bucky on his return. Bucky fought this with tooth and nail, only convinced by Steve’s calm words, by Steve waiting outside the room, by Steve becoming the sounding board Bucky used when any particular therapist got too close to an exposed nerve. Bucky would talk, curse, and cry. And for the first time, call it reflex, it allowed Steve to cry too. For the first time in seventy years, since sitting in a bombed out bar, he cries. He expects catharsis every time, some form of benediction, some lifting of the guilt that rests heavy on his shoulders. Instead, it is shallow, the briefest flush of serotonin released as comfort, absorbed too quickly by a body that shouldn’t exist.

 

*

 

                Bucky grieves. He is open in his grief, open in the tragedy he feels and the loss of self. And people seem to understand. He is given permission to be angry, to be sad, to lash out against the world. Steve has no such permission, nor would he ever ask for it, because how can he possibly begin to atone for what he allowed to happen?

 

*

 

                They tell Bucky Steve crashed the plane on purpose. That he could have jumped, could have survived. Bucky fought this, refusing to believe it. Of course. Steve explains tiredly, and he’s still so tired, that he just wanted things to stop, that he hadn’t slept since Bucky had fallen and he’d heard hypothermia was just like going to sleep. (And that some part of his brain had whispered that he’d see Bucky again. The ice offered refuge, it offered the smallest possibility of hope, that in death, lovers are reunited, so he lay down and waited, waited to see Bucky standing before him, calling him a damn punk and a fool.)

                Instead he awoke to a façade and then the noise and the blare of the twenty first century. Alone. Waking up felt like everything he deserved and nothing that he wanted.

 

*

 

                That night, Bucky put his right hand through the bathroom mirror. Steve picks out the shards of glass out of already healing skin, Bucky’s blood slippery and then crisp on his own flesh, bright red fading to a deep crimson, pooling in the creases between his fingers and the lines of his life. He watches the pink water disappear down the plug hole, but the feeling of it, caking and heavy, remains, the proof of his guilt. They sit in silence on the bloodied floor as the sun rises, until Steve is called away for a meeting. He pauses before he leaves. Doesn’t want Bucky to feel the same ache of responsibility he does. So he apologises for blaming Bucky. Admits that it had been suicide. Admits that there had been time to prevent it. But he doesn’t apologise for doing it. The words would be ashes on his tongue, so instead he swallows them down. He leaves Bucky and goes out to the world and pretends to lead.

                He comes home to find the mess cleared away, and Bucky asleep in his bed, eyes swollen red and hair plastered to his face. Steve wonders briefly how Bucky can look so small, so childlike, with his metal arm such a hulking presence. But somehow, Bucky manages it. Not wanting to disturb him, Steve leaves quietly. It’s not like he’s sleeping much these days anyway.

 

*

 

                Steve always wanted to be a soldier. Like his father. His mother always told him that his soul was too gentle, too pure for warfare, but no. He wanted to fight, to defend and to protect. Now, in the breathing space of a mission completed, Steve looks down at his hands that his mother held so tightly when he was a child, remembering the softness of her grip. The wave of sorrow he feels nearly has him doubling over. Gently, almost curiously, he takes hold of the little finger on his left hand, and bends it backwards. He muffles a cry as the bone snaps, not a compound fracture, but loose and jagged nonetheless. For a few brief moments, a surge of adrenaline lulls him and forces the pain away, like all those times with the Commandos when everything had been focussed to a single goal. And then the adrenaline fades and his finger just throbs, but it’s something. Sensation. He splints it and goes back to mentally writing his mission report, adding in one extra injury. It heals in two days, and looking at it makes him feel slightly sick, and also somehow cheated, like he should have suffered more.

 

*

 

                Steve’s days repeat. The same chores, the same food, the same clothes, variations on the same theme. He does this because the thought of coming up with something new is overwhelming. It is easier to go with the tide than to fight it. He knows he should be seen to be trying new things, for Bucky’s sake more than his own, but the lethargy means all good intentions are left far behind, and instead he sticks to the familiar. Because it’s easy. Because it means he doesn’t have to think.

                Bucky gets art supplies delivered and Steve balks at them, hoping his face doesn’t betray him.

                “You used to draw all the time.”

                Steve has seen those sketchbooks, in museums around the country. Books of the dead. Smiling faces he’ll never see again. Lifetimes lived whilst he slept.

                “Everyone I drew before is either dying or dead.” He replies, thinking of Peggy and her moments of clarity, followed by her moments of cloudy uncertainty.

                Bucky is silent.

                “I don’t want that to happen again.” Steve fills the gap. Thinks of the pages dedicated to Bucky. Enough to fill an exhibition. Hell, there had probably been one. I can’t let this happen to you again, he doesn’t say.

                And so the subject is closed.

 

 

*

 

                Bucky tells Sam that he thinks there is something wrong with Steve. This is news to Steve. Finally, he feels something. Anger. Shame. Sam comes to him using words Steve has heard Bucky use. Steve can barely lift his head as he listens to Sam’s gentle, reassuring voice. Sam, who put up with so much, who came back from a war broken and put himself back together. If Sam managed it, why couldn’t he? His gut clenches at the thought, and he feels awful, and excuses himself.

 

*

 

                He can’t bring himself to talk to Bucky for three days. On the fourth, something inside him breaks. As though a dam has cracked, suddenly he feels again, a torrent of grief and pain and hurt and a deep abiding sadness he hadn’t even realised he was carrying with him all become apparent. He goes to Bucky, apologises, can barely get the words out for crying so hard. Bucky wipes away his tears, tells him it’s going to be okay, because now they have a name for what’s wrong and there are people who can help.

                Bucky sleeps in Steve’s bed that night, curled around the larger man with his left arm wrapped tight around Steve’s stomach. They used to do this, a long time ago, a lifetime ago. They used to do more than this. In his more selfish moments since Bucky returned, came home, Steve had wondered whether he should ask Bucky to join him, a quick fuck to prove they’re both still alive. But this is different. Bucky’s nose presses against the back of Steve’s neck, and he can feel the tiny sleep breaths Bucky always used to take just before he fell into a dream. When the nightmare inevitably wakes him, Bucky is there, pressing a cooling kiss to his too hot forehead, and holding his hand as his body shakes. It’s so familiar, so reminiscent of before that Steve can’t help but bark out a laugh, and he realises it sounds broken even to his own ears. He remembers being the sick child, he remembers the brown haired boy who was popular and kind, who could have chosen anyone for a best friend, but instead hung around with little Steve Rogers, who would have picked a fight with his own shadow had it looked at him funny. Now Bucky anchors him to the world, and for the first time in a long time, Steve feels like he might belong.

 

*

 

                Steve goes to his appointments. Bucky waits outside. Their roles reverse and it is Steve who talks, curses, cries afterwards. And Bucky listens. Doesn’t placate. Doesn’t try to make it okay. Just tries to validate, and understand. The appointments infuriate him, because Bucky had it so much worse. Why is it Steve who can’t seem to hold it together, whilst Bucky continues to grow day by day into who he used to be and something more, something stronger? Steve lets that anger out, and allows himself to be told he’s not responsible for Bucky’s fall. If I could have just – is an oft repeated sentence fragment, which his therapist never allows him to finish. Instead, he is told to focus on the here and now, that Bucky survived and that he survived and they are both here and that his final wish, to see Bucky again, came true, and isn’t that enough to be going with?

               And Steve finds himself agreeing. It’s a gossamer thread. A door just slightly ajar that lets the light into a dark room. But it might be enough.

 

*

 

                There are good days and bad days. Everyone treads around him like they are walking on broken glass. After he confesses that he broke his finger deliberately, begging the therapist never to tell Bucky, he isn’t sent on missions alone anymore, and the ones he is sent on could be done by someone without his skillset. It’s busywork, but it works. It allows him time to recover, whilst still giving him purpose. He is compromised, he understands. And he can’t allow anyone to get hurt by this. So he does the vetted missions, completes them, and Bucky smiles at him when he comes home and asks how it went and he finds himself wanting to talk, about a little girl who gave him a daisy after he’d rescued her from her captors, who still saw things with an innocence he envied and hoped would never be wiped out. He presses the daisy between the pages of a book, a cookery book in fact, between the chocolate brownies and the chocolate chip cookies.

 

*

 

                On the good days, they go out, walk around New York and take in the sights, talk about how things have changed. At first this is a painful reminder of how out of place Steve feels, but soon it becomes a learning experience, and an exercise in finding out new and interesting parts of the city. And sometimes Steve will find Bucky looking at him, and he will feel that fierce swell of loyalty and love that bound him to the other man for all those years. He bumps his shoulder against Bucky’s, the contact grounding, and finds himself suddenly akin to a man thirsting in the desert. He allows himself to take Bucky’s hand, loosely at first, the touch of skin on skin or skin on metal depending which side Bucky walks on is electrifying, both sending him flying and keeping his feet firmly on terra firma at the same time. And so he allows his grip to become tighter, his fingers laced with Bucky’s, and he marvels that he can do this now, that nobody looks at them twice. Steve finds that he wants. And he allows himself to want.

                On the bad days, Steve begs Bucky to leave him alone, but Bucky joins him under the tented duvet, tells him bad jokes and stories about the past that seem to meander off but it doesn’t matter, because it gets Steve out of his own head and so they sit in the half gloom and Steve never dares to question whether Bucky feels that same desire too, he hopes that he does, but this? The small touches and the hushed conversations of bad days?

                If nothing more ever becomes of them, it’s enough. It’s enough.

 

*

 

                Bucky is sleeping and Steve’s fingers are itching for something to do. His eyes scan the room and he realises he never threw out the art supplies Bucky bought him. So, without waking Bucky, he folds open the sketchpad, and selects a pencil. It comes back to him like riding a bicycle, and soon he is tracing out the ebbs and flows of Bucky’s form. Bucky opens one eye and

grins, his mouth quirking up.

                “I thought you didn’t draw anymore?”

                And there’s so much Steve wants to reply, but instead he focuses on the drawing, and Bucky doesn’t move, allows himself to be captured on paper for the first time in over seventy years.

 

*

 

                Steve kisses Bucky on a cold March evening, over a game of Scrabble. His tiles don’t hold his attention, instead he finds himself staring at the other man, averting his gaze when Bucky looks up, until Bucky gives him that smirk, the one he recognises as I dare you. So Steve dares. Because it’s been nearly a month since a Bad Day, and Steve remembers how to smile and laugh and draw, and he only sees his therapist once a week and it doesn’t feel like pulling teeth anymore. So Steve leans across the board and kisses Bucky, chaste but meaningful. And then they go back to the game, though Steve finds it even more impossible to concentrate, given the flush of red that decorates Bucky’s cheeks and the way he’s biting his lip as though to stop himself grinning himself stupid.

 

*

 

                Whereas before Steve was guarded, on edge, he is looser, freer. He breathes more easily, the world seems like less of a harsh place to be. There are casual touches, more kisses, and there is laughter. Some days it feels like the old days, just the two of them, or if they’re both feeling strong, a mishmash of friends. Soon there are more faces in Steve’s sketchbook, and the nightmares are fewer and further between. It’s not linear, there are bad days still, but there’s a certain progress for the both of them. Bucky gets asked if he’ll join the Avengers, and Steve retches into the toilet, before confessing that he can’t stand to lose Bucky again. Bucky wipes his forehead and tells him it’ll be okay, lightning doesn’t strike twice. Steve laughs and tells him they know the god of thunder, life isn’t what it used to be and old maxims don’t cut it anymore. But they agree, Bucky deserves his choice, and his choice is to help people. So he joins the Avengers, and Steve frets but doesn’t break, and after his first mission, Bucky barely makes it through the doorway before Steve is pressing kisses to his throat, almost growling as he pushes Bucky against the wall, before dragging him to the bedroom where he sucks bruises onto pale skin, before ghosting kisses over them, watching them fade before his eyes, as Bucky gasps Steve’s name as though praying for salvation.

 

*

 

                Steve is self-aware enough to know that he and Captain America are never going to be separate entities in the eyes of the public. It is a conclusion that is hard fought for, and one that sits ill with him. But it is the truth. For children to know that the man they look up to is just as flawed, if not more so, as everyone else, he’s not sure whether that’s the right thing to do. He has a

responsibility to be a role model. Role models shouldn’t be broken. And yet.

                One day, Bucky shows him a letter from a young veteran, whose spine was broken and who is recovering but will probably never walk again. Whose best friend died shoving him out of the way of the worst of the blast. The letter is full of self-hatred and self-blame. The veteran talks about the nightmares he has, and the what-ifs. And Steve realises that being a role model isn’t about being perfect. It’s about doing the right thing and encouraging others to do the same. So, with Bucky at his side, after months of careful deliberation, he starts to talk, about the good days, the bad days, the old days and the new days. About grief and guilt and regret and the emptiness, the void of feelings he carried with him for so long. And it’s not long before he receives more letters, letters that thank him, and Bucky reads them out because he finds himself unable to, the pride in Bucky’s voice so evident it almost makes Steve want to stop him, but no. Steve is quietly proud, and so they start a scrapbook, pasting the letters of hope and thanks in, and Steve tries to find the time to reply to them all, even though he knows in his heart of hearts that there will always be more. People are broken every day. But people recover every day too. He looks at Bucky as his inspiration, as his guiding star. Bucky who has been through so much and rescued him one more time. He hopes everybody out there who needs one has a Bucky. He sends up a private prayer that he has his.

 

*

 

                The skies over New York are too polluted to see the stars now, of course, but Steve and Bucky still lie on their backs on the top of the Avengers tower, trying to make out the constellations.

                “Do you remember the time we got so lost we didn’t know whether we were coming or going? And Dugan had been mumbling under his breath for at least two hours, but nobody was listening to him because we were all tired and just wanted to get back to base? And finally, he stops you, and points to a star, and then traced it to another one, across the sky, before saying ‘I appreciate what you’re trying to accomplish, but if you’ll allow me, the stars are as good a compass as any I’ve ever found.’ And then he led us back, and Peggy was waiting, looking picture perfect as always, asking what had taken so long? You’re umm-ng and ahh-ing, not wanting to admit you got us lost. And Dugan just, in that voice of his, ever so politely chips in ‘Ma’am, we thought it was such a beautiful night, we’d take in the stars.’ He told me later that he learnt to navigate them from his father, who learnt from his father, who was a sailor. That the stars would always guide you home, if only you knew how to read them. I never did learn.”

                “There’s still time, Buck.”

                “I know. But I don’t feel lost.”

                And in that moment, the city asleep below them, a certain peace fell. Two ghost boys staring up into the night, the stars looking back, the same stars that had saved them seventy years ago. The world had turned, changed almost beyond recognition, but the stars remained, burning so far away they may well be long dead. But their light remained, to guide home all the lost souls who needed them. And you know something? They’re still there, even if you can’t see them.

**Author's Note:**

> Reuploaded because of a tumblr message and because I like this series a lot. 
> 
> Find me at transbucky.tumblr.com and feel free to throw writing prompts at me, I want to try get back into writing again. Thanks for reading. :)


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